A friend of mine made a comment the other day that has stuck in my mind.  He pointed out that so frequently we pray for revival and for persons in our communities, cities, and nation, to come to know the saving and healing love of Christ.  We encourage our pastors and our church members to take the work of evangelization seriously, we run outreaches to the young people in our schools, we prepare and plan Alpha courses for the adults, yet somehow we don’t truly believe that these would be of any effect…

That may sound shocking to you – certainly shocked me when I first thought about it!  We plan for failure!Do we really plan our Churches for failure?Well, let me ask you a few questions that may help you to clarify this shocking thought…1.  Let’s start small – how often do you encourage ALL of the members of your Church to get involved in service activities in your Church?  If you don’t do it often, that could already be a problem!2.  However, let’s say you do it fairly frequently, let me ask you what would you do if EVERY member in your Church turned up to serve in some ministry or another one Monday morning!?  Would you have enough work for them to do?  Honestly, would your Church’s ’volunteer’ systems cope with every person turning up to serve?  Would you have adequate systems to match people’s gifts to the needs of your community?  In fact, do you even know what your members’ gifts are, and do most of our Churches really know what the felt needs, and real needs, of our communities (cities, towns, schools, businesses, local governments etc.) are!?…  I would have to be honest and say ’no’ to both of the questions above, I never TRULY mean that I want EVERY member in service, after all if I did I would challenge EVERY member, at EVERY opportunity, and I would have systems in place for them to be able to serve IN THEIR AREA of gifting and expertise…But, let’s say that some of you out there were able to answer ’YES’ to both questions above…  let me ask a few more questions.3.  What would you do if EVERY PERSON in you city did come to know Christ!?  Would you even be able to have all of them in worship services in the churches in your city / town (let alone have enough human and physical resources to disciple them!)Our research in South Africa (with the many towns that our Global Day of Prayer coordinators visit) has shown the following:-  Even in a country that indicates that 78.9% of all persons in each town are Christian, the seating capacity of Churches in each town is only about 5% of the population (on average).  This is something simple to work out, simply check how many people live in your city or town.  Then check how many Churches there are and either check their exact seating capacity (which we have done in quite a few towns and cities), or work out an average (it would seem that in South Africa the average seating capacity of our Churches ranges between 200 – 350 seats).  You’ll be shocked to discover that the average seating capacity of the churches in your town or city is only about 5% of the population!Now of course seating in the Church is not everything!  But it certainly does count for something – my point is simply this, we speak and preach, and think about the total transformation and renewal of communities, towns, cities, provinces, and nations – yet we don’t plan for them!  It’s as if we don’t believe that it is possible!To read the remainder of this article please follow this link.I would also encourage you to follow this link to see numerous posts on marketplace ministry. Finaly, please follow this link for some posts on marketplace ministry that relate to the new book ’Transform your work life: Turn your ordinary day into an extraordinary calling’ that Graham Power and I wrote together.